Got some interesting emails this morning. One was from Jetpack (an add-on service that provides a lot of great extra features for WordPress) telling me that it noticed the site was not responding. The other was from GoDaddy excitedly explaining that my hosting account was updated and now had a new IP.

Hmm… Coincidence that the IP was changed and the site no longer responded? I think not…

Fortunately, I was still able to connect to the database and access all of the WordPress files manually. After a frustrating hour or so of poking around, I managed to discover that the database hostname had changed. An update to the wp-config file to supply the new hostname and all was right with the site again.

This sort of frustrating thing isn’t the first time GoDaddy annoyed me. Once, they went and updated the version of php used on another site I had, which still used some deprecated php code that no longer worked with the new version. That was an even more frustrating problem to figure out, since there was no info whatsoever that the change had been made. At least this time, there was a clue that a change on their end could have been responsible and helped point me in the right direction.

I think that in this latest scenario, perhaps I’ve got my WordPress installed in a somewhat non-standard way for GoDaddy? (I can’t imagine they would have had a change like this break things for everyone that hosts a WordPress install on their system, but who knows…)

But still… Some advance notice on these sorts of things might be nice?